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Let’s Get Fiscal For busy school administrators, time is money. An experienced CFO shares how to create school district budgets efficiently and effectively. By Dr. Sam Robinson Identifying school district employee needs and making budget projections is as simple as understanding revenue and expenditures with a student-first approach. For a simple and successful budget projection, administrators should budget for 90% of expected revenue and keep expenditures within 90% of those revenue projections. In reality, it is the details of projections and administrative and departmental staff collaboration that make employee staffing needs and budget projections accurate and successful. As humans, we are creators of habit. Determining staffing needs and making budget projections requires a good understanding of the revenue and expenditure habits of your school district. For minimal staffing with maximum efficiencies, it is important to form a good habit of communicating with stakeholders while understanding student needs and requirements. Employee staffing needs are pretty simple. Understanding
student enrollment is the first priority. Is enrollment increasing or decreasing? Are the special populations that require specialized teachers increasing or decreasing? What support personnel are needed to support and manage the school and the district? Once these questions have been answered after collaboration with site and district administrators, budgeters can move on to the next phase of personnel, evaluation.
Administrators working on budgets should evaluate student programming from academics to extracurriculars and the student-to-teacher ratios needed for the district based upon identified student and community needs. This will not always be what the instructional staff may want, but it might be the best fit to achieve desired outcomes within the fiscal limitations of the budget.
